Creating “Share This on Facebook/Twitter” Links

Recently, someone asked me how to put together a link in HTML that, when clicked, took the clicker to their Twitter page with a tweet already filled in. She basically wanted an easy way to let people share her newsletter. I was putting this little color-coded guide together for her and I thought I’d turn it into a blog post. Check it.

Regular Ol’ Links

To begin, let’s review how to make a simple link in HTML. First, make sure you’re editing in HTML and not Rich Text. You’ll be able to tell because you’ll see a bunch of ““s everywhere. Below is a color-coded diagram of the code for an HTML link. (If you’re a newbie to HTML, remember that your code won’t be in color)

This is extremely helpful! This will hopefully get more of our supporters to share our news and updates to their own networks. Thanks for looking into this!

http://blog.socialsourcecommons.org/ Matt Garcia

Thanks, Lisa! I’d love to see examples of this type of thing if you end up using it in your communications further down the line, so feel free to post some links.

Anonymous

This is really cool. It might be nice to actually include some of these links in the body of my blog posts, since I think many times the “share this” button that sits in the navigation bar or in the footer is too easily overlooked.

http://blog.socialsourcecommons.org/ Matt Garcia

Definitely. I’ve been thinking lately how the “Share This” buttons that border every post, page and block have pretty much become part of the ignorable template of the website. It’d be interesting to see how many more people used the functionality if it was actually called out in the text of the post. If you play around with it, I’d love to hear what comes up!